Exhibition

Opening Reception: Friday November 8th, 6-9pm

With two wall-size monochrome canvases, Olivier Mosset engages us with his own peculiar and subtle brand of site-specificity. These enormous works (in 5 parts each) are not only made to the exact dimensions of the gallery wall, their vibrant orange color adopts the Pantone® 021 color that the gallery uses for it’s letter-heads, business cards and general stationary. In a further twist of institutional doubling, this exhibition also mirrors the artist’s last exhibition at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, which featured the same wall-sized canvases in white.
Kate Linker has written that Mosset’s work …dramatizes the division between art’s materialist production and its idealist reception. With this installation, we are again invited to lose ourselves in the scale and sensuality of the canvases, before being thrown-back again by the works’ recalcitrant, yet playful, materiality.

Artist Bio

Olivier Mosset’s work originally gained prominence in Paris in the 1960’s as part of the B.M.P.T. group, which also included Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni. In a brief yet provocative series of actions in 1967-68, the group attacked the bourgeois Parisian art establishment, subverting assumptions of authorship, originality and unity surrounding the art object. Mosset developed this critique through his own subsequent work as a painter, the repeated circle paintings of 1966-74 were followed by a series of stripe paintings in 1974-78. After relocating to New York in 1978, Mosset refocused himself on the painterly aspect of his work over its discursive concerns. He produced a body of monochrome canvases from 1978, followed by a return to abstract work in the 1980’s, which was subsequently cited as a major influence by the generation of ‘Neo-Geo’ painters emerging at that time.